Be honest about your successes

And focus on how you overcame the failures

In today’s frantic times of ever-sharing our successes, we often end up embellishing our journey towards them.

It’s true that while saying “Look at this amazing thing I’ve done!” sounds great, interesting, and appealing to others (in our eyes), it also propagates a false story for others to read/hear about.

Others compare their experiences with ours and can’t help but thinking they’re missing out. That they’re not enjoying life as well as we. I’ve been there.

That’s because they’re comparing their rich, full stories — with the good and the bad—, with our single-line-all-is-great one. It doesn’t add up.

Our story is not complete.

I’m not saying it’s a lie, but that it’s not all there is to it. It’s missing very important pieces about things that weren’t as great, and honestly, that probably ended up making the experience richer.

Instead, I suggest we start telling stories with more honesty.

Perhaps something like “Look at this amazing thing I’ve done! I really enjoyed X and Y wasn’t as good, to be honest. In the end it was still a Z kind of experience.”.

I know. At a glance it doesn’t sound interesting, but I think it’s definitely more honest and real and benefits everyone, so I’ll use a real situation here, as an example:

<insert great-looking dinner photo>

Just finished eating this amazing pasta we cooked

Now, let’s compare with something more honest, like:

<insert great-looking dinner photo>

Wow! Only took me 3 tries to nail this photo!

After a couple of days of eating nasty fast food, we decided to get back into the healthy game and cook this amazing pasta! It was really good.

Now we just gotta build momentum!

But it’s so much longer to write, and people will see I’ve failed. Why honesty?

Well, for me, it’s exactly because of that feeling that I’m not doing enough. That I’m not living life to the fullest. That others are doing a much better job at life than I am.

Screw that. This moment is enough.

When I read something like that second version of the story, I can relate to it much more easily and have deeper, better thoughts and conversations around it.

I know I’d rather read more honest things.

Written by Bruno Bernardino.Thoughts can change, disappear, or simply be observed.